William Greenwood grew up in
California where he studied languages and social sciences, graduating in
philosophy in the late 1960's. He joined the farm workers' struggle for justice
during early unionization, then organized the first farm worker cooperative in
Watsonville. Subsequently, he worked on agricultural and small business
projects in Latin America, the Middle East and Central Asia.

During the 1970's in Santa Cruz, he
and several local poets and translators co-founded Green Horse Press and
operated a letterpress in Neal Coonerty's garage. Green Horse published Into the Center of America and his
translation of a selection from Guatemalan poet Arqueles Morales’ La Paz Aún No Ganada, chosen for the
1971 Colección la Honda by Cuba’s Casa De las Américas. In 2014 Word Temple Press published Landscape/Cityscape.

Paul Vangelisti: “In Landscape/Cityscape
Greenwood resumes his singular, sometimes eccentric explorations, getting at
the core of what language may propose for one’s way of living. It is a sensual,
hard-bought knowledge that pervades Greenwood’s poetry, founded in and of the
world, reinforced by the adventure of language.”

Nils
Peterson is Professor Emeritus at San Jose State University where he
taught in
the English and Humanities Departments. He has coached and worked with
countless writers through workshops and retreats in conjunction with
such poets as Robert Bly, William Stafford and Galway Kinnell. In 2009,
he was
chosen to be the first Poet Laureate of Santa Clara County.

He
has published poetry, science fiction, and articles on subjects as varying as
golf and Shakespeare. A chapbook of poems entitled Here Is No Ordinary
Rejoicing was published by No Deadlines Press, a collection of poems
entitled The Comedy of Desire with an introduction by Robert Bly was
published by the Blue Sofa Press, a collection of poems entitled Driving a
Herd of Moose to Durango appeared in 2005, For This Day in 2008, and
A Walk to the Center of Things in 2011.

David Brinks is a
long-time resident of New Orleans’ historic French Quarter (Vieux Carré),
Brinks is a poet, historian, editor, publisher, arts curator and educator. His
family dates back more than seven generations in the region. His mother’s
family is Acadian French and Houma Indian. His father’s family is Siouan Indian
and Choctaw Indian. Brinks is the author of seven published collections of
poetry including the critically acclaimed The Caveat Onus (Black Widow Press
2009) and The Secret Brain: Selected Poems 1995 – 2012 (Black Widow Press
2012). He has been a guest on NPR radio as well as on PBS’ News Hour with Jim
Lehrer.

Friday

from his
translation of the New Selected Poems of one of Spain’s greatest
poets

LUIS
CERNUDA

Saturday July 18, 2015,
7pm

Felix Kulpa Gallery

107 Elm Street

Santa Cruz

Luis Cernuda (1902-1963) is one of the
leading modern poets in the Spanish language. Stephen Kessler’s
earlier translation of Cernuda’s prose poems, Written in Water
(City Lights Books, 2004) received the Lambda Literary Award for
Gay Men’s Poetry, and his version of Cernuda’s late poems,
Desolation of the Chimera (White Pine Press, 2009), received
the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of
American Poets. Forbidden Pleasures (Black Widow Press,
2015), which is selected from the first twenty-five years of
Cernuda’s career (1924-1949), completes the third volume of
Kessler’s selected Cernuda and is the largest collection of his
poetry ever to appear in English. Please join us to celebrate the
publication of this important book.

Thursday

Sholeh Wolpé and Adela Najarro

Tuesday,
May 12, 2015 at 7:30 PM,

Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz

Sholeh Wolpé is a poet,
playwright and literary translator whose work, according to Terrain
Journal, “transcends the boundaries of language, gender, ethnicity
and nationality.” Born in Iran, she spent most of her teen years in
Trinidad and the UK before settling in the United States. Wolpé has
authored three collections of poetry, most recently Keeping Time with
Blue Hyacinths. She is the editor of two anthologies, Breaking the
Jaws of Silence, which gathers American voices of protest, and The
Forbidden: Poems from Iran and Its Exiles. Her books of translations
include, Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad and a Persian
translation of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself (co-translated with
Mohsen Emadi), commissioned by the University of Iowa’s
International Writing Program in celebration of Whitman’s work. Her
latest book, Attar’s Conference of the Birds, will be released by
W. W. Norton in 2017. Wolpé’s accolades include the 2014 Pen/Heim
award, 2013 Midwest Book Award, 2010 Lois Roth Persian Translation
prize and residency awards at Hedgebrook in Whidbey Island, and
Château de Lavigny in Switzerland.

Adela Najarro is the author of
two full-length poetry collections, Split Geography (Mouthfeel Press)
and Twice Told Over (Unsolicited Press), both published in March
2015. David A. Sullivan notes that in Split Geography “the
personality that emerges from this collection is funny, poignant,
irascible, and above all, in love with the promise that writing can
be a spiritual exercise to remake ourselves. These are poems to live
among. “About Twice Told Over, ”Juan Felipe Herrera states, “A
tour de force, magnificent, lovely, sculpted, drenched with Borges,
Sexton, Najarro. A radically new Latina verse.” She currently lives
in Santa Cruz and teaches creative writing, literature and
composition at Cabrillo College.

Roy Mashis a long time board member of Marin Poetry
Center. He holds degrees in English,
Philosophy, and Computer Science, though he currently doodles his
time away staring out of café windows, dabbing up the seeds that
have fallen from an everything bagel, and mentally thumbing over his
poems that have appeared widely in journals such as AGNI,
Barrow Street, Nimrod, Poetry East, and
River Styx.
He is the recipient of the Atlanta Review International Publication
Award, and the Grand Prize Winner of the 2015 Poets’ Dinner
competition. His first full length book, Buyer’s
Remorse
(Cherry Grove Collections), debuted in 2014.

"Buyer’s
Remorse is
a celebration of the small, the overlooked, the underrated. Doggedly
anti-lofty, reveling in the This-Worldly, the poems caper around the
themes of the body, of mathematics and rationality, adolescence and
middle-age, love and fear and death. The tone ranges from the
irreverent to the wistful – the spritz of seltzer in the face of
the Creature from the Black Lagoon to the lover standing in one sock.
Drawing on sources from The Three Stooges to Archimedes, Lavoisier to
Tweety Bird, Mash is a latter day Anti-Oracle, a nail in the tire of
post-modernity, an incorrigible wag who’s smuggled his pea shooter
into the Church of Poetry. Be
ready to duck."

Gerald Fleming’s most recent books
are The Choreographer, longer prose poems (Sixteen Rivers
Press, San Francisco) and Night of Pure Breathing, prose poems
from Hanging Loose Press in New York. He’s written three books for
teachers, including Rain, Steam, and Speed
(Jossey-Bass/Wiley). His poetry has appeared in many magazines over
the decades, including New Letters, Western Humanities
Review, Carolina Quarterly, New World Writing, Hanging Loose, and
many others. Between 1995 and 2000 he edited and published the
literary magazine Barnabe Mountain Review, and currently edits
the limited-edition vitreous magazine One (More) Glass. He
taught in the San Francisco Public Schools for thirty-seven years,
and lives most of the year in Northern California, part of the year
in Paris.

Of Fleming’s
Night of Pure Breathing, Gary Young said:

“These dark fables, written in a
language ‘born of rage,’ furiously peel back the veneer of the
world we think we know. Part fairy tale, part dream, these poems
explore a region where the ordinary and the fantastic overlap, where
a smile can get a job, and where identities are fluid and
interchangeable... Many poems are set in exotic locations—Corfu,
Bali, Mexico, Ukraine—but they all merge to create a discrete,
elemental landscape, a poetic geography where this remarkable
collection plays out. In one poem, ‘a boy and a girl court each
other by telling ghost stories.’ Gerald Fleming’s Night of
Pure Breathing is a collection that seduces the reader in just
that way. Hold onto your socks; you’re in for a ride.”

Maria Garcia Teutsch is a poet and editor. She has published over 20 journals of poetry as editor-in-chief of the Homestead Review, published by Hartnell College in Salinas, and Ping-Pong journal of art and literature, published by the Henry Miller Library
in Big Sur, California. She teaches poetry and creative writing online.
She serves as president of the board of the Henry Miller Memorial
Library.

Ilya Kaminsky on Maria’s Poetics:
“Maria Garcia Teutsch is a poet who looks for lyricism and sensual
flavor in our daily moments, and makes poems that ride on the human
nerve, like Frank O’Hara told us the poet must.”

Eleni Sikelianos is the author of six previous books of poetry, most recently You Animal Machine, The Loving Detail of the Living and the Dead, Body Clock and The California Poem; the hybrid memoir, The Book of Jon; and a translation of Jacques Roubaud’s Exchanges on Light.
She has been the happy recipient of awards from the National Endowment
for the Arts, the Fulbright Foundation, The National Poetry Series, and
the New York Foundation for the Arts, among others, and of Princeton
University’s Seeger Fellowship and two Gertrude Stein Awards for
Innovative American Writing. Sikelianos’s work has been widely
anthologized, in two Norton anthologies (Postmodern American Poetry and American Hybrid) as well as Tin House’s Satellite Convulsions, A Best of Fence, and The Arcadia Project.
She has collaborated with filmmakers, visual artists, composers, and
musicians, including Philip Glass and Ed Bowes. At present, she teaches
in and directs the Creative Writing Program at The University of Denver
and teaches for Naropa’s Summer Writing Program. She shares her days
with the novelist Laird Hunt and their daughter Eva Grace.

Stephen
Kessler
is a poet, prose writer, translator and editor. His most recent books
include Scratch
Pegasus (poems),
Poems
of Consummation by
Vicente Aleixandre (translation), The
Tolstoy of the Zulus: On Culture, Arts & Letters (essays),
and The
Mental Traveler (novel).
He received the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the
Academy of American Poets for his version of Desolation
of the Chimera by
Luis Cernuda. He is the subject of a FloodLight Feature in Issue 5
of the online journal phren-Z.

Alan
Soldofsky has
published a new collection of poems, In
the Buddha Factory,
from Truman State University Press. Also three chapbooks of poems:
Kenora Station, Staying Home, and most recently a chapbook that
includes a selection of poems by his son, the poet Adam Soldofsky,
Holding
Adam / My Father's Books.
He has published poems widely in magazines and academic journals
including: The
Antioch Review,
The
Crab Orchard Review,
The
Georgia Review,
The
Gettysburg Review,
The
Greensboro Review,
Grand
Street,
The
Michigan Quarterly Review,
The
Nation,
The
North American Review,
and Poetry
East.
His poems have three times been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He
has also contributed essays on modern and contemporary poets to a
variety of journals. His articles, essays, interviews, and book
reviews have appeared widely in periodicals including Chelsea,
Narrative,
Poetry
Flash,
Quarry
West,
and The
Writer's Chronicle.
He is a professor of English and Creative Writing at San Jose State
University where he directs the MFA Program
in Creative Writing.

Richard Silberg, Associate
Editor of Poetry Flash, hosts the Poetry Flash reading series. He is
author of The Horses, New and Selected Poems (Red Hen Press, 2012).
His previous poetry collections include Deconstruction of the Blues
(Red Hen Press, 2006), which received the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles
Literary Award. His poetry has also appeared in American Poetry
Review, Denver Quarterly, VOLT, New American Writing, Catamaran
Literary Reader, and other journals. His co-translation of Korean
poet Ko Un, The Three Way Tavern: Selected Poems (University of
California Press, 2006), received a Northern California Book Award
for Translation. His most recent co-translation is This Side of Time,
poems by Ko Un (White Pine Press, 2012). His books also include
Doubleness (Heyday, 2000) and a collection of his Poetry Flash
essays, Reading the Sphere: A Geography of Contemporary American
Poetry (Berkeley Hills, 2002). Robert Hass said of Reading the
Sphere: "No one is writing about poetry with more vividness,
particularity, intelligence, and range, than Richard Silberg."
The Horses, New & Selected Poems is his most recent book.
Silberg taught Poetry Workshops and "Writing and Appreciating
Contemporary Poetry" at UC Berkeley Extension for over twenty
years. Richard Silberg was born in New York City in 1942. He
received his BA from Harvard in 1963 and his MA in creative writing
from San Francisco State University.

Friday

Esteemed poet, and Santa Cruz mainstay, Robert Sward, has graciously agreed to become co-curator of A New Cadence Poetry Series. Welcome, Robert!

ROBERT SWARD has taught at Cornell
University, the Iowa Writers' Workshop and UC Santa Cruz. A
Guggenheim Fellow he was chosen by Lucile Clifton to receive a Villa
Montalvo Literary Arts Award. His more than 20 books include: Four
Incarnations (Coffee House Press), Rosicrucian in the Basement, The
Collected Poems, and God is in the Cracks (Black Moss Press, Canada),
now in its second printing. His latest, New & Selected Poems,
1957-2012, was published by Red Hen Press.

Born and raised in Chicago, Sward
served in the U.S. Navy in the combat zone during the Korean War and
later worked for CBC Radio and as book reviewer and feature writer
for The Toronto Star and Globe & Mail while living in Canada.
Sward now lives in Santa Cruz with his wife, visual artist Gloria K.
Alford.

For more info see:
www.robertsward.com

see also Contemporary Authors
Autobiography Series, Volume 206.

and, Garrison Keillor reads "God
is in the
Cracks"
http://jjwebb.ihwy.com/rosycrossfather/godisinthecracks_keillor.mp3